Development Marketplace

What’s the key ingredient for successful innovations? I often hear people answer creativity, collaboration, open mindset, leadership. For me, it is the ability to learn and adapt.

But learning is meaningful only if it’s based on reliable data, and adaptation leads to the expected results if the data is timely and feeds into the decision-making process.

For example, take GNRC Medical (formerly known as Guwahati Neurological Research Centre), a hospital in North Guwahati, India that aims to provide quality healthcare service at an affordable cost to underprivileged populations. GNRC has an inclusive multi-specialty facility, provides ambulance services, and offers customized healthcare packages to the poor, promoting preventive healthcare and early intervention. Despite its unique service offer, GNRC faced major challenges, including the lack of awareness among local communities on medical conditions and available treatments.

Almost two months ago the announcement was made about the World Bank, IFC and partners providing grants of 1.25 million via the Egypt DM. Since that announcement, many have been contacting us via various channels to find out who the actual 34 grantees are? Well here is your answer! Below please find the 34 selected grantees institutions, with links to their websites and social channels when available. They are broken down by governorate, with a very small blurb about each one. Why so little information? Well, most of these organizations speak Arabic only and therefor their information is only available in Arabic. We are working on translating all related documents, and while that takes time, we hope to have full pages on our website for each one of them later in September. We also hope to do feature stories here in our blog for some if not all the grantees, stay tuned!

ASSYUT

Community Development Association in Al Ezzeyya: Recycling agricultural residues and animal waste into compost and high value organic fertilizers, to manage waste, decrease environment hazards, and increase productivityof the agricultural land.Friends Association for the Disabled and Community Development at Sadfa: Improving livelihood through supporting modernization, quality management and marketing of beehives and their honey production.Alhayah Erada for Sustainable Development: Revival of kilim/wool weaving to generate income and create employment for women of the Beni Addiat village.Community Development Association in Badary: Hand-processing and packaging of pomegranate fruit to increase income for young girls and youth through introducing quality and marketing to new local and export markets.

In case you missed it, check out this video (mostly in Hindi) about the inspiring story of "Under the Mango Tree" on Awaaz entrepreneur, a feature on CNBC Awaaz's YouTube Channel. UTMT is an India DM 2013 grantee (if link fails, hit refresh), and it is a project that trained 1,500 farmers on apiculture, or bee rearing.

Thirty-five organizations will be awarded $800,000 by the Egypt Development Marketplace (DM) funded by The World Bank Group (WBG) and its local and international partners. Each of the grantees will receive $25,000 to scale up their business model that would generate employment in the agriculture and handicraft sectors. Winning organizations will beshowcased at a DM sponsored event. A number of financial institutions, social entrepreneurs, investors, development organizations, and government officials will also participate in the event to bring attention to organizations implementing innovative solutions to unemployment in the country.

Overwhelming response to “Call for Proposal”

The call for proposals was launched in November and closed in January. At closing, 180 proposals from 171 organizations were submitted for funding. Preference was given to projects implemented in Upper Egypt and the majority of proposals were for projects in Minya. Applicants comprised the following types of organizations: 89 percent were Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs), 7 percent were private companies and 4 percent were foundations.

From its conception, the Egypt DM has been designed to surface and build the skills of organizations creating jobs in the country, primarily in the poorest areas with an emphasis on Upper Egypt. To generate interest in the competition and to ensure organizations operating in targeted areas applied, outreach events were held in Assyut, Qena, Aswan, and Minya. As a follow up, skill-building workshops in business planning were held for each of the 70 finalists to ensure high quality proposals were submitted.

For 21 years, Fundación Tzedaká, who won an award at the 2010 Latin America Development Marketplace, has been developing social programs and actions to improve the living conditions of citizens who live in poverty in Argentina. Based on a model that works in partnerships, and with a comprehensive and multidisciplinary approach, they develop programs in areas such as health, education, housing, job training, food, seniors and children, taking family as the focal point of intervention. Transparency, efficient management of resources and consistent accountability are the organization’s pillars.

Some of their programs have been recognized for their contribution to society, as is the case of "Refuot", the largest Community Medicine Bank in the country and “Accion Joven”; a training program that helps young adults improve their development and employment performance and the program which won the LAC DM award. Over 750 young adults have been trained for different positions with a high opportunity rate in the job scenarios.

Find out more about the social enterprise movement in Egypt. This timely piece from BBC that features some exciting social enterprises ranging from roof-top gardening to paper made from recycled agriculture waste.

Development Marketplace partners, Iman Bibars from Ashoka and Magdi Amin from the International Finance Corporation (a co-sponsor of the upcoming Egypt DM) highlight important barriers blocking the movement's growth and hindering its ability to keep pace with demand for improved goods and services to the poor.

On August 23th, in Santa Clara, California, I attended business plan presentations of 19 competitively selected social entrepreneurs, who delivered their pitches to a panel of experienced professionals plus a general audience. These presentations marked the culmination of the 10th annual Global Social Benefit Incubator (GSBI™) program organized by Santa Clara University. The Development Marketplace has been one of its partners since its beginning. The program includes intensive work by each entrepreneur with two to three designated mentors, and a series of on-campus classes. Its main objective is to strengthen material that each entrepreneur already has available, refine their business models and develop professional organizational documentation that can be presented to attract investors.

As Albania prepares to celebrate 100 years of independence in 2012 with an eye towards becoming a member of the European Union; it must make crucial improvements in a sensitive area: good governance.

For better governance, citizens need more access to information; budgets and local taxes need to be transparent. Women and youth need equal opportunities in business, and agriculture policies need to be developed openly.

To address these, the government is drafting and implementing new policies for central and local government, with support from the World Bank Project for Good Governance in Albania. The World Bank is further supporting the government's agenda through support for civil society projects using the Development Marketplace competition platform to solicit and select high impact projects for implementation. The British Council is overseeing their implementation.

Having traveled to both East Africa and India over the past several weeks, I’ve been reflecting on what ‘innovation’ means in different contexts. It’s easy to get caught in a technology-centric worldview in places like Bangalore and even Nairobi these days. But when I get past the superficial stories and dig a bit deeper, I realize that impactful innovation is less about shiny tools and technology and more about ‘listening to users’ and transforming social processes to solve problems that matter to people.

My walk through a Delhi slum comes immediately to mind. While there I visited Operation Asha, a 2011 India Development Marketplace winner that is working to arrest the spread of tuberculosis (TB). India is one of the only countries in the world where the rate of infection is growing despite the falling incidence of the disease globally. The previous day, I sat with colleagues from Microsoft Research in Bangalore who explained the simple but critical advances they had made in writing open-source software to verify the identity of patients visiting clinics, aggregating data on missed doses, and using text messages to increase compliance.

A relic cacao tree nestles deep in the valleys of the Northern Range of the island of Trinidad in a sleepy cacao village called Brasso Seco. Moss hangs from this tree creating an eerie effect; its ripe, rough, “lagarta” (alligator) shaped pods only hint at their fascinating contents of pale-coloured, prized Criollo-influenced, flavourful beans.

This is the realisation of a cacao collector’s dream: ancient Trinitario cacao from the place where Trinitario originated. Likewise, across the numerous valleys in villages of Aripo, Lopinot, Naranjho, Cumana in North Trinidad and the steep terrains of Moriah, Runnemede and Lanse Fourmi in Western Tobago, cacao trees of mainly relic Trinitario genotype still survive, carefully conserved in farmers’ fields over the decades spanning from when cocoa reigned as king, in the Caribbean islands of Trinidad and Tobago, to the present day. The chocolate world owes these dedicated farmers a debt of gratitude.

Cacao scientists from Bioversity International and the University of British Colombia at Vancouver, joined forces with some from the Cocoa Research Section of the Ministry of Food Production, Land and Marine Affairs (MFPLMA) and the Cocoa Research Unit (CRU) of the University of the West Indies (UWI), St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago and conceived and fine-tuned an ambitious project to promote and utilise the latent treasures contained in the vast acreages of relic cacao still remarkably preserved in Trinidad and Tobago.